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• run two thread at the same time in java

  - by user1805005

  i have used timertask to schedule my java program. now when the run method of timertask is in process, i want to run two threads which run at the same time and do different functions. here is my code.. please help me.. import java.util.Calendar; import java.util.Date; import java.util.Timer; import java.util.TimerTask; public class timercheck extends TimerTask{ // my first thread Thread t1 = new Thread(){ public void run(){ for(int i = 1;i <= 10;i++) { System.out.println(i); } } }; // my second thread Thread t2 = new Thread(){ public void run(){ for(int i = 11;i <= 20;i++) { System.out.println(i); } } }; public static void main(String[] args){ long ONCE_PER_DAY = 1000*60*60*24; Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance(); calendar.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, 12); calendar.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 05); calendar.set(Calendar.SECOND, 00); Date time = calendar.getTime(); TimerTask check = new timercheck(); Timer timer = new Timer(); timer.scheduleAtFixedRate(check, time ,ONCE_PER_DAY); } @Override // run method of timer task public void run() { t1.start(); t2.start(); } }

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• How to play multiple audio sources simultaneously in Silverlight

  - by Shurup

  I want to play simultaneous multiply audio sources in Silverlight. So I've created a prototype in Silverlight 4 that should play a two mp3 files containing the same ticks sound with an intervall 1 second. So these files must be sounded as one sound if they will be played together with any whole second offsets (0 and 1, 0 and 2, 1 and 1 seconds, etc.) I my prototype I use two MediaElement (me and me2) objects. DateTime startTime; private void Play_Clicked(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { me.SetSource(new FileStream(file1), FileMode.Open))); me2.SetSource(new FileStream(file2), FileMode.Open))); var timer = new DispatcherTimer { Interval = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(1) }; timer.Tick += RefreshData; timer.Start(); } First file should be played at 00:00 sec. and the second in 00:02 second. void RefreshData(object sender, EventArgs e) { if(me.CurrentState != MediaElementState.Playing) { startTime = DateTime.Now; me.Play(); return; } var elapsed = DateTime.Now - startTime; if(me2.CurrentState != MediaElementState.Playing && elapsed >= TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2)) { me2.Play(); ((DispatcherTimer)sender).Stop(); } } The tracks played every time different and not simultaneous as they should (as one sound). Addition: I've tested a code from the Bobby's answer. private void Play_Clicked(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { me.SetSource(new FileStream(file1), FileMode.Open))); me2.SetSource(new FileStream(file2), FileMode.Open))); // This code plays well enough. // me.Play(); // me2.Play(); // But adding the 2 second offset using the timer, // they play no simultaneous. var timer = new DispatcherTimer { Interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2) }; timer.Tick += (source, arg) => { me2.Play(); ((DispatcherTimer)source).Stop(); }; timer.Start(); } Is it possible to play them together using only one MediaElement or any implementation of MediaStreamSource that can play multiply sources?

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• NSTimer as a self-targeting ivar.

  - by Matt Wilding

  I have come across an awkward situation where I would like to have a class with an NSTimer instance variable that repeatedly calls a method of the class as long as the class is alive. For illustration purposes, it might look like this: // .h @interface MyClock : NSObject { NSTimer* _myTimer; } - (void)timerTick; @end - // .m @implementation MyClock - (id)init { self = [super init]; if (self) { _myTimer = [[NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:1.0f target:self selector:@selector(timerTick) userInfo:nil repeats:NO] retain]; } return self; } - (void)dealloc { [_myTimer invalidate]; [_myTImer release]; [super dealloc]; } - (void)timerTick { // Do something fantastic. } @end That's what I want. I don't want to to have to expose an interface on my class to start and stop the internal timer, I just want it to run while the class exists. Seems simple enough. But the problem is that NSTimer retains its target. That means that as long as that timer is active, it is keeping the class from being dealloc'd by normal memory management methods because the timer has retained it. Manually adjusting the retain count is out of the question. This behavior of NSTimer seems like it would make it difficult to ever have a repeating timer as an ivar, because I can't think of a time when an ivar should retain its owning class. This leaves me with the unpleasant duty of coming up with some method of providing an interface on MyClock that allows users of the class to control when the timer is started and stopped. Besides adding unneeded complexity, this is annoying because having one owner of an instance of the class invalidate the timer could step on the toes of another owner who is counting on it to keep running. I could implement my own pseudo-retain-count-system for keeping the timer running but, ...seriously? This is way to much work for such a simple concept. Any solution I can think of feels hacky. I ended up writing a wrapper for NSTimer that behaves exactly like a normal NSTimer, but doesn't retain its target. I don't like it, and I would appreciate any insight.

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• Loop through children and display each, as3

  - by VideoDnd

  How do I loop through all of my children, and display each? I would like to know the best way to do this. my children and containerfive children, one plays every sec, 1,2,3, etc. var square1:Square1 = new Square1; var square2:Square2 = new Square2; var square3:Square3 = new Square3; var square4:Square4 = new Square4; var square5:Square5 = new Square5; var container:Sprite = new Sprite; addChild(container); container.addChild(square1) container.addChild(square2) container.addChild(square3) container.addChild(square4) container.addChild(square5) my timer var timly:Timer = new Timer(1000, 5); timly.start(); timly.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, onLoop); Note: Tried for loop, numChildren -1, and visibility ERROR 'access of undefined property' //Thomas's idea var timly:Timer = new Timer(1000, 10); timly.start(); timly.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, onLoop, false, 0, true); // var square1:Square1 = new Square1; square1.visible = false container.addChild(square2) var square2:Square2 = new Square2; square2.visible = false container.addChild(square3) var square3:Square3 = new Square3; square3.visible = false container.addChild(square3) var square4:Square4 = new Square4; square4.visible = false container.addChild(square4) var square5:Square5 = new Square5; square5.visible = false container.addChild(square5) var container:Sprite = new Sprite; this.addChild(container); var curCount:Number = 100; // function collectChildren(container:DisplayObjectContainer):Array { var len:int = container.numChildren; var mySquaresArray:Array = []; for (var i:int = 0; i < len; i++) { mySquaresArray.push(container.getChildAt(i).name); } return mySquaresArray; } // function onLoop( e:Event ) { curCount = e.target.currentCount; if( curCount > 1 ) { var previous_square = curCount -2; mySquaresArray[previous_square].visible = false; } var current_square = curCount - 1; mySquaresArray[current_square].visible = true; }

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• Swing: does DefaultBoundedRangeModel coalesce multiple events?

  - by Jason S

  I have a JProgressBar displaying a BoundedRangeModel which is extremely fine grained and I was concerned that updating it too often would slow down my computer. So I wrote a quick test program (see below) which has a 10Hz timer but each timer tick makes 10,000 calls to microtick() which in turn increments the BoundedRangeModel. Yet it seems to play nicely with a JProgressBar; my CPU is not working hard to run the program. How does JProgressBar or DefaultBoundedRangeModel do this? They seem to be smart about how much work it does to update the JProgressBar, so that as a user I don't have to worry about updating the BoundedRangeModel's value. package com.example.test.gui; import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.awt.event.ActionListener; import javax.swing.BoundedRangeModel; import javax.swing.DefaultBoundedRangeModel; import javax.swing.JFrame; import javax.swing.JPanel; import javax.swing.JProgressBar; import javax.swing.Timer; public class BoundedRangeModelTest1 extends JFrame { final private BoundedRangeModel brm = new DefaultBoundedRangeModel(); final private Timer timer = new Timer(100, new ActionListener() { @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent arg0) { tick(); } }); public BoundedRangeModelTest1(String title) { super(title); JPanel p = new JPanel(); p.add(new JProgressBar(this.brm)); getContentPane().add(p); this.brm.setMaximum(1000000); this.brm.setMinimum(0); this.brm.setValue(0); } protected void tick() { for (int i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) { microtick(); } } private void microtick() { this.brm.setValue(this.brm.getValue()+1); } public void start() { this.timer.start(); } static public void main(String[] args) { BoundedRangeModelTest1 f = new BoundedRangeModelTest1("BoundedRangeModelTest1"); f.pack(); f.setVisible(true); f.setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE); f.start(); } }

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• Interpreting and using the Asterisk "timing test" command

  - by zigg

  Timing is very important for certain kinds of applications in Asterisk. If DAHDI is the timing source, the dahdi_test command can be used to check the timing provided by the DAHDI kernel module. If dahdi_test returns exclusively measurements above 99.975%, the DAHDI timing source is generally considered good. Since Asterisk 1.6, new timing sources have become available, such as pthread and timerfd. The accuracy of these timing sources seems to be measurable with the Asterisk CLI timing test command: localhost*CLI> timing test Attempting to test a timer with 50 ticks per second. Using the 'timerfd' timing module for this test. It has been 1000 milliseconds, and we got 50 timer ticks My concern is that timing 50 ticks seems to be a considerably less stressful test than dahdi_test's 8192 samples in 8000 ms, particularly since just about every system I've tried it on, virtual or otherwise, can handle it. I can ask timing test to ramp it up to what I think are dahdi_test's standards: localhost*CLI> timing test 1024 Attempting to test a timer with 1024 ticks per second. Using the 'timerfd' timing module for this test. It has been 1000 milliseconds, and we got 1024 timer ticks This will indeed break down a bit depending on the system I'm using, usually with a decrease in timer ticks. But I'm not sure whether this is useful to stress it to this level. Is there authoritative guidance on using and interpreting the timing test command to insure that a given Asterisk system has a timing source that will work well?

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• How to manage a lot of Action Listeners for multiple buttons

  - by Wumbo4Dayz

  I have this Tic Tac Toe game and I thought of this really cool way to draw out the grid of 9 little boxes. I was thinking of putting buttons in each of those boxes. How should I give each button (9 buttons in total) an ActionListener that draws either an X or O? Should they each have their own, or should I do some sort of code that detects turns in this? Could I even do a JButton Array and do some for loops to put 9 buttons. So many possibilities, but which one is the most proper? Code so far: import javax.swing.*; import java.awt.event.*; import java.awt.*; public class Board extends JPanel implements ActionListener{ public Board(){ Timer timer = new Timer(25,this); timer.start(); } @Override protected void paintComponent(Graphics g){ for(int y = 0; y < 3; y++){ for(int x = 0; x < 3; x++){ g.drawRect(x*64, y*64, 64, 64); } } } public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){ repaint(); } }

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• skips nines in counter object, AS3

  - by VideoDnd

  It's not that noticeable at first, but my counter skips over to zero and ignores the nines. How can I get my counter to not skip over the nines? my FLA import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.events.Event; import flash.utils.Timer; import flash.events.TimerEvent; var timer:Timer; var count:int = 0; var fcount:int = 0; var numbers:NumbersView; trace("-----new NumberDocument created"); timer = new Timer(10); timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, incrementCounter); timer.start(); numbers = new NumbersView(); addChild(numbers); addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, enterFrameHandler); //addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, traceMeOut); function incrementCounter(event:TimerEvent) { count++; fcount=int(count*count/1000); } function formatCount(i:int):String { return ("000000000" + i).substr(-9, 9); } function enterFrameHandler(e:Event):void { numbers.setTime(formatCount(fcount)); } function traceMeOut() { trace("-----Im here on stage!"); } NumbersView.as //NumbersView.as - Your Document Class package { import flash.display.MovieClip; public class NumbersView extends MovieClip { private var _listItems:Array; private const numHeight:int = 120; public function NumbersView() { _listItems = new Array(); var item:NumberImage; for (var i:Number = 0; i < 9; i++) { item = new NumberImage(); addChild(item); item.x = i * item.width; _listItems.push(item); } setTime('123456789'); } public function setTime($number:String):void { var nums:Array = $number.split(""); trace(nums); for (var i:Number = 0; i < nums.length; i++) { _listItems[i].start( int(nums[i]) ); } } } } Variation of NumbersView.as with Tweener //...SNIPPET public function setTime($number:String):void { var nums:Array = $number.split(""); for (var i:Number = 0; i < nums.length; i++) { if (nums[i] == previousNums[i]) continue; Tweener.removeTweens(_listItems[i]); var nuNum:int = int(nums[i]); var nuY:int = nuNum == 0 ? 0 : (nuNum - 1) * -numHeight; trace("nuY = " + nuY); trace("cY = " + _listItems[i].y); Tweener.addTween(_listItems[i], { y:nuY, time:0 } ); } previousNums = nums; } Variation of NumbersView.as that doesn't skip 9, but resets from bottom every count //...SNIPPET public function setTime($number:String):void { var nums:Array = $number.split(""); for (var i:Number = 0; i < nums.length; i++) { if (nums[i] == previousNums[i]) continue; Tweener.removeTweens(_listItems[i]); var newY:int = int(nums[i]) * -numHeight; if (_listItems[i].y < 0) _listItems[i].y = numHeight; Tweener.addTween(_listItems[i], { y:newY, time:3 } ); } previousNums = nums; } PUBLIC CLASS extends MovieClip place 'NumbersView.as' in same directory CLASS Library/'right-click' Properties/Class:NumberImage SYMBOL number column 70x1080 numbers 70x120 TWEENER caurina folder in local directory

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• Actionscript 3: Monitoring the activity level for multiple Microphones doesn't seem to work.

  - by Dave

  For a project I want to show all available webcams and microphones, so that the user can easily select whichever webcam/microphone combination they prefer. I run into an issue with the microphones listing though. Each microphone is listed with an activity animation and it's name. I am able to list all Microphones just fine (using the Microphone.names Array), but it seems like I can only get the activity viewer to work for one microphone. The other microphones show up with '-1' activity, which (as far as I know) is Flex for 'present, but not in use'. When unplugging the microphone that does show activity, the next one (in my case, the mic-in line on my motherboard) shows up with '0' activity (it's not connected, so that makes sense). During my testing I have a total of 3 microphones available, the not-connected onboard mic-in port, and two connected microphones. For testing purposes I use a timer that traces the current microphone activity each 100ms and the graph is also shown. It does not seem to matter what default microphone I set via flash' settings panel. The code I've only attached the revelant code snippets below to make it easier for you to read through them. Please let me know if you prefer the entire code. Main application.mxml Note: cont is a VBox. i is defined before this code snippet. var mics:Array = Microphone.names; for(i=0; i < mics.length; i++){ var mic:settingsMicEntry = new assets.settingsMicEntry; mic.d = {name: mics[i], index: i}; cont.addChild(mic); } assets/settingsMicEntry.mxml timer is defined before this code snippet. the SoundTransform is added to silence local microphone playback. Excluding this code does not solve the problem, sadly (I've tried). display is an MXML Canvas object. mic = Microphone.getMicrophone(d.index); if(mic){ // Temporary: The Microphones' visualizer var bar:Box = new Box(); bar.y = 50; bar.height = 0; bar.width = 66; bar.setStyle("backgroundColor", 0x003300); display.addChild(bar); var tf:SoundTransform = new SoundTransform(0); mic.setLoopBack(true); mic.soundTransform = tf; timer = new Timer(100); timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, function(e:TimerEvent):void{ var h:int = Math.floor((display.height/100)*mic.activityLevel); bar.height = (h>-1) ? h : 0; bar.y = (h>-1) ? display.height-h : display.height; trace('TIMER: '+h+' from '+d.name); }); timer.start(); } I'm pulling my hear out here, so any help is much appreciated! Thanks, -Dave Ps.: Pardon the messiness of the code!

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• Replication Services as ETL extraction tool

  - by jorg

  In my last blog post I explained the principles of Replication Services and the possibilities it offers in a BI environment. One of the possibilities I described was the use of snapshot replication as an ETL extraction tool: “Snapshot Replication can also be useful in BI environments, if you don’t need a near real-time copy of the database, you can choose to use this form of replication. Next to an alternative for Transactional Replication it can be used to stage data so it can be transformed and moved into the data warehousing environment afterwards. In many solutions I have seen developers create multiple SSIS packages that simply copies data from one or more source systems to a staging database that figures as source for the ETL process. The creation of these packages takes a lot of (boring) time, while Replication Services can do the same in minutes. It is possible to filter out columns and/or records and it can even apply schema changes automatically so I think it offers enough features here. I don’t know how the performance will be and if it really works as good for this purpose as I expect, but I want to try this out soon!” Well I have tried it out and I must say it worked well. I was able to let replication services do work in a fraction of the time it would cost me to do the same in SSIS. What I did was the following: Configure snapshot replication for some Adventure Works tables, this was quite simple and straightforward. Create an SSIS package that executes the snapshot replication on demand and waits for its completion. This is something that you can’t do with out of the box functionality. While configuring the snapshot replication two SQL Agent Jobs are created, one for the creation of the snapshot and one for the distribution of the snapshot. Unfortunately these jobs are  asynchronous which means that if you execute them they immediately report back if the job started successfully or not, they do not wait for completion and report its result afterwards. So I had to create an SSIS package that executes the jobs and waits for their completion before the rest of the ETL process continues. Fortunately I was able to create the SSIS package with the desired functionality. I have made a step-by-step guide that will help you configure the snapshot replication and I have uploaded the SSIS package you need to execute it. Configure snapshot replication   The first step is to create a publication on the database you want to replicate. Connect to SQL Server Management Studio and right-click Replication, choose for New.. Publication…   The New Publication Wizard appears, click Next Choose your “source” database and click Next Choose Snapshot publication and click Next   You can now select tables and other objects that you want to publish Expand Tables and select the tables that are needed in your ETL process In the next screen you can add filters on the selected tables which can be very useful. Think about selecting only the last x days of data for example. Its possible to filter out rows and/or columns. In this example I did not apply any filters. Schedule the Snapshot Agent to run at a desired time, by doing this a SQL Agent Job is created which we need to execute from a SSIS package later on. Next you need to set the Security Settings for the Snapshot Agent. Click on the Security Settings button.   In this example I ran the Agent under the SQL Server Agent service account. This is not recommended as a security best practice. Fortunately there is an excellent article on TechNet which tells you exactly how to set up the security for replication services. Read it here and make sure you follow the guidelines!   On the next screen choose to create the publication at the end of the wizard Give the publication a name (SnapshotTest) and complete the wizard   The publication is created and the articles (tables in this case) are added Now the publication is created successfully its time to create a new subscription for this publication.   Expand the Replication folder in SSMS and right click Local Subscriptions, choose New Subscriptions   The New Subscription Wizard appears   Select the publisher on which you just created your publication and select the database and publication (SnapshotTest)   You can now choose where the Distribution Agent should run. If it runs at the distributor (push subscriptions) it causes extra processing overhead. If you use a separate server for your ETL process and databases choose to run each agent at its subscriber (pull subscriptions) to reduce the processing overhead at the distributor. Of course we need a database for the subscription and fortunately the Wizard can create it for you. Choose for New database   Give the database the desired name, set the desired options and click OK You can now add multiple SQL Server Subscribers which is not necessary in this case but can be very useful.   You now need to set the security settings for the Distribution Agent. Click on the …. button Again, in this example I ran the Agent under the SQL Server Agent service account. Read the security best practices here   Click Next   Make sure you create a synchronization job schedule again. This job is also necessary in the SSIS package later on. Initialize the subscription at first synchronization Select the first box to create the subscription when finishing this wizard Complete the wizard by clicking Finish The subscription will be created In SSMS you see a new database is created, the subscriber. There are no tables or other objects in the database available yet because the replication jobs did not ran yet. Now expand the SQL Server Agent, go to Jobs and search for the job that creates the snapshot:   Rename this job to “CreateSnapshot” Now search for the job that distributes the snapshot:   Rename this job to “DistributeSnapshot” Create an SSIS package that executes the snapshot replication We now need an SSIS package that will take care of the execution of both jobs. The CreateSnapshot job needs to execute and finish before the DistributeSnapshot job runs. After the DistributeSnapshot job has started the package needs to wait until its finished before the package execution finishes. The Execute SQL Server Agent Job Task is designed to execute SQL Agent Jobs from SSIS. Unfortunately this SSIS task only executes the job and reports back if the job started succesfully or not, it does not report if the job actually completed with success or failure. This is because these jobs are asynchronous. The SSIS package I’ve created does the following: It runs the CreateSnapshot job It checks every 5 seconds if the job is completed with a for loop When the CreateSnapshot job is completed it starts the DistributeSnapshot job And again it waits until the snapshot is delivered before the package will finish successfully Quite simple and the package is ready to use as standalone extract mechanism. After executing the package the replicated tables are added to the subscriber database and are filled with data:   Download the SSIS package here (SSIS 2008) Conclusion In this example I only replicated 5 tables, I could create a SSIS package that does the same in approximately the same amount of time. But if I replicated all the 70+ AdventureWorks tables I would save a lot of time and boring work! With replication services you also benefit from the feature that schema changes are applied automatically which means your entire extract phase wont break. Because a snapshot is created using the bcp utility (bulk copy) it’s also quite fast, so the performance will be quite good. Disadvantages of using snapshot replication as extraction tool is the limitation on source systems. You can only choose SQL Server or Oracle databases to act as a publisher. So if you plan to build an extract phase for your ETL process that will invoke a lot of tables think about replication services, it would save you a lot of time and thanks to the Extract SSIS package I’ve created you can perfectly fit it in your usual SSIS ETL process.

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• SQL Sentry First Impressions

  - by AjarnMark

  After struggling to defend my SQL Servers from a political attack recently, I realized that I needed better tools to back me up, and SQL Sentry is the leading candidate. A couple of weeks ago, seemingly from out of nowhere, complaints from the business users started coming in that one of the core internal applications was running dramatically slower than normal, and fingers were being pointed at the SQL Server.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a production DBA whose entire job is to monitor and maintain our SQL Servers.  The responsibility falls to me to do the best I can, investing only a small portion of my time, because there are so many other responsibilities to take care of, and our industry is still deep in recession.  I inherited these SQL Servers and have made significant improvements in process and procedure, but I had not yet made the time to take real baseline measurements or keep a really close eye on the performance.  Like many DBAs, I wrote several of my own tools and used the “built-in tools” like Profiler, PerfMon, and sp_who2 (did I mention most of our instances are SQL Server 2000?).  These have all served me well for in-the-moment troubleshooting and maintenance, but they really fell down on the job when I was called upon to “prove” that SQL Server performance was acceptable and more importantly had not degraded recently (i.e. historical comparisons).  I really didn’t have anything from a historical comparison perspective, but I was able to show that current performance was acceptable, and deflect attention back onto other components (which in fact turned out to be the real culprit). That experience dramatically illustrated the need for better monitoring tools.  Coincidentally, I had been talking recently to my boss about the mini nightmare of monitoring several critical and interdependent overnight jobs that operate on separate instances of SQL Server.  Among other tools, I had been using Idera’s SQL Job Manager which is a free tool and did a nice job of showing me job schedules and histories in a nice calendar view.  This worked fairly well, and for the money (did I mention it was free?) it couldn’t be beat.  But it is based on the stored job history in MSDB, and there were other performance problems that we ran into when we started changing the settings for how much job history to retain, in order to be able to look back a month or more in the calendar view.  Another coincidence (if you believe in such things) was that when we had some of those performance challenges, I posted a couple of questions to the #sqlhelp hashtag on Twitter and Greg Gonzalez (@SQLSensei) suggested I check out SQL Sentry’s Event Manager.  At the time, I just thought he worked there, but later found out that he founded the company.  When I took a quick look at the features & benefits, the one that really jumped out at me is Chaining and Queueing which sounded like it would really help with our “interdependent jobs on different servers” issue. I know that is a lot of background story and coincidences, but hopefully you have stuck with me so far, and now we have arrived at the point where last week I downloaded and installed the 30-day trial of the SQL Sentry Power Suite, which is Event Manager plus Performance Advisor.  And I must say that I really like what I see so far.  Here are a few highlights: Great Support.  I had two issues getting the trial setup and monitoring a handful of our servers.  One of which was entirely my fault (missed a security setting in SQL 2008) and the other was mostly my fault (late change to some config settings that were apparently cached and did not get refreshed properly).  In both cases, the support staff at SQL Sentry were very responsive and rather quickly figured out what the cause and fix was for each of them.  This left me with a great impression of the company.  Kudos to them! Chaining and Queueing.  While I have not yet activated this feature, I am very excited about the possibilities.  We have jobs on three different instances of SQL Server that have to be run in a certain order, and each has to finish before the next can successfully begin, and I believe this feature will ensure just that.  It has been a real pain in the backside when one of those jobs runs just a little too long and does not finish before the job on another instance starts, thus triggering a chain reaction of either outright job failures, or worse, successful completion of completely invalid processing. Calendar View.  I really, really like the Event Manager calendar view where I can see all jobs and events across all instances and identify potential resource contention as well as windows of opportunity for maintenance activity.  Very well done, and based on Event Manager’s own database of accumulated historical information rather than querying the source instances every time. Performance Advisor Dashboard History View.  This view let’s me quickly select a date and time range and it displays graphs of key SQL Server and Windows metrics.  This is exactly the thing I needed to answer the “has performance changed recently” question at the beginning of this post. Reporting Services Subscription Jobs with Report Name.  This was a big and VERY pleasant surprise.  If you have ever looked at the list of SQL Server jobs that SQL Server Reporting Services creates when you make a Subscription, you will notice that they all have some sort of GUID as the name of the job.  This is really ugly, and really annoying because when you are just looking at the SQL Agent and Job Activity Monitor, if you see that Job X failed, you really do not have any indication in the name or the properties of the Job itself, as to what Report that was for.  But with SQL Sentry Event Manager you do.  The Jobs list in the Navigator pane in SQL Sentry, amazingly, displays the name of the Report that the Subscription Job is for.  And when you open it to see more details, it shows you the full Reporting Services path to that Report, so you can immediately track it down in the Report Manager in case you want to identify/notify the owner or edit the Subscription information.  I did not expect this at all, but I sure do like it.  HOORAY! That is just my first impressions from using the tools for a few days.  And I haven’t even gotten into how it showed me where I was completely mistaken about one aspect of my SQL Server disk configurations.  I’ll share that lesson in another blog entry.  But I have to say it again, the combination of Event Manager and Performance Advisor working together have really made me a fan.

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• What's the difference between !col and col=false in MySQL?

  - by Mask

  The two statements have totally different performance: mysql> explain select * from jobs where createIndexed=false; +----+-------------+-------+------+----------------------+----------------------+---------+-------+------+-------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+-------+------+----------------------+----------------------+---------+-------+------+-------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | jobs | ref | i_jobs_createIndexed | i_jobs_createIndexed | 1 | const | 1 | | +----+-------------+-------+------+----------------------+----------------------+---------+-------+------+-------+ 1 row in set (0.01 sec) mysql> explain select * from jobs where !createIndexed; +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | jobs | ALL | NULL | NULL | NULL | NULL | 17996 | Using where | +----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+-------+-------------+ Column definition and related index for aiding analysis: createIndexed tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0, create index i_jobs_createIndexed on jobs(createIndexed);

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• Why you need to learn async in .NET

  - by PSteele

  I had an opportunity to teach a quick class yesterday about what’s new in .NET 4.0.  One of the topics was the TPL (Task Parallel Library) and how it can make async programming easier.  I also stressed that this is the direction Microsoft is going with for C# 5.0 and learning the TPL will greatly benefit their understanding of the new async stuff.  We had a little time left over and I was able to show some code that uses the Async CTP to accomplish some stuff, but it wasn’t a simple demo that you could jump in to and understand so I thought I’d thrown one together and put it in a blog post. The entire solution file with all of the sample projects is located here. A Simple Example Let’s start with a super-simple example (WindowsApplication01 in the solution). I’ve got a form that displays a label and a button.  When the user clicks the button, I want to start displaying the current time for 15 seconds and then stop. What I’d like to write is this: lblTime.ForeColor = Color.Red; for (var x = 0; x < 15; x++) { lblTime.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); Thread.Sleep(1000); } lblTime.ForeColor = SystemColors.ControlText; (Note that I also changed the label’s color while counting – not quite an ILM-level effect, but it adds something to the demo!) As I’m sure most of my readers are aware, you can’t write WinForms code this way.  WinForms apps, by default, only have one thread running and it’s main job is to process messages from the windows message pump (for a more thorough explanation, see my Visual Studio Magazine article on multithreading in WinForms).  If you put a Thread.Sleep in the middle of that code, your UI will be locked up and unresponsive for those 15 seconds.  Not a good UX and something that needs to be fixed.  Sure, I could throw an “Application.DoEvents()” in there, but that’s hacky. The Windows Timer Then I think, “I can solve that.  I’ll use the Windows Timer to handle the timing in the background and simply notify me when the time has changed”.  Let’s see how I could accomplish this with a Windows timer (WindowsApplication02 in the solution): public partial class Form1 : Form { private readonly Timer clockTimer; private int counter;   public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); clockTimer = new Timer {Interval = 1000}; clockTimer.Tick += UpdateLabel; }   private void UpdateLabel(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblTime.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); counter++; if (counter == 15) { clockTimer.Enabled = false; lblTime.ForeColor = SystemColors.ControlText; } }   private void cmdStart_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblTime.ForeColor = Color.Red; counter = 0; clockTimer.Start(); } } Holy cow – things got pretty complicated here.  I use the timer to fire off a Tick event every second.  Inside there, I can update the label.  Granted, I can’t use a simple for/loop and have to maintain a global counter for the number of iterations.  And my “end” code (when the loop is finished) is now buried inside the bottom of the Tick event (inside an “if” statement).  I do, however, get a responsive application that doesn’t hang or stop repainting while the 15 seconds are ticking away. But doesn’t .NET have something that makes background processing easier? The BackgroundWorker Next I try .NET’s BackgroundWorker component – it’s specifically designed to do processing in a background thread (leaving the UI thread free to process the windows message pump) and allows updates to be performed on the main UI thread (WindowsApplication03 in the solution): public partial class Form1 : Form { private readonly BackgroundWorker worker;   public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); worker = new BackgroundWorker {WorkerReportsProgress = true}; worker.DoWork += StartUpdating; worker.ProgressChanged += UpdateLabel; worker.RunWorkerCompleted += ResetLabelColor; }   private void StartUpdating(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) { var workerObject = (BackgroundWorker) sender; for (int x = 0; x < 15; x++) { workerObject.ReportProgress(0); Thread.Sleep(1000); } }   private void UpdateLabel(object sender, ProgressChangedEventArgs e) { lblTime.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); }   private void ResetLabelColor(object sender, RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs e) { lblTime.ForeColor = SystemColors.ControlText; }   private void cmdStart_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblTime.ForeColor = Color.Red; worker.RunWorkerAsync(); } } Well, this got a little better (I think).  At least I now have my simple for/next loop back.  Unfortunately, I’m still dealing with event handlers spread throughout my code to co-ordinate all of this stuff in the right order. Time to look into the future. The async way Using the Async CTP, I can go back to much simpler code (WindowsApplication04 in the solution): private async void cmdStart_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { lblTime.ForeColor = Color.Red; for (var x = 0; x < 15; x++) { lblTime.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString("HH:mm:ss"); await TaskEx.Delay(1000); } lblTime.ForeColor = SystemColors.ControlText; } This code will run just like the Timer or BackgroundWorker versions – fully responsive during the updates – yet is way easier to implement.  In fact, it’s almost a line-for-line copy of the original version of this code.  All of the async plumbing is handled by the compiler and the framework.  My code goes back to representing the “what” of what I want to do, not the “how”. I urge you to download the Async CTP.  All you need is .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 sp1 – no need to set up a virtual machine with the VS2011 beta (unless, of course, you want to dive right in to the C# 5.0 stuff!).  Starting playing around with this today and see how much easier it will be in the future to write async-enabled applications.

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• Efficient job progress update in web application

  - by Endru6

  Hi, Creating a web application (Django in my case, but I think the question is more general) that is administrating a cluster of workers doing queued jobs, there is a need to track each jobs progress. When I've done it using database UPDATE (PostgreSQL in this case), it severely hits the database performance, because each UPDATE creates a new row in a table, and in my case only vacuuming DB removes obsolete rows. Having 30 jobs running and reporting progress every 1 minute DB may require vacuuming (and it means huge slow downs on a front end side for all the employees working with the system) every 10 days. Because the progress information isn't critical, ie. it doesn't have to be persistent, how would you do the progress updates from jobs without using an overhead database implies? There are 30 worker servers, each doing 1 or 2 jobs simultaneously, 1 front end server which serves a web application to users, and 1 database server.

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• How can I render player movement on a 2d plane efficiently?

  - by user422318

  I'm prototyping a 2d HTML5 game with similar interaction to Diablo II. (See an older post of mine describing the interaction here: How can I imitate interaction and movement in Diablo II?) I just got the player click-to-move system working using the Bresenham algorithm but I can't figure out how to efficiently render the player's avatar as he moves across the screen. By the time redraw() is called, the player has already finished moving to the target point. If I try to call redraw() more frequently (based on my game timer), there's incredible system lag and I don't even see the avatar image glide across the screen. I have a game timer based off this awesome timer class: http://www.dailycoding.com/Posts/object_oriented_programming_with_javascript__timer_class.aspx In the future, there will be multiple enemies chasing the player. Fast pace is essential to the experience. What should I do?

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• Why are only some of my objects being rendered?

  - by BleedObsidian

  Every time I create a new asteroid the previous one is no longer rendered? I did some debugging and printed out the size of Array-List 'Small' and when a new asteroid is created it doesn't go down, so the thread is still there it's just not being rendered, Why? StatePlay: package me.bleedobsidian.astroidjump; import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer; import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics; import org.newdawn.slick.SlickException; import org.newdawn.slick.state.BasicGameState; import org.newdawn.slick.state.StateBasedGame; public class StatePlay extends BasicGameState { int stateID = 10; Player player; Asteroids asteroids; StatePlay(int stateID) { this.stateID = stateID; } @Override public int getID() { return stateID; } @Override public void init(GameContainer gc, StateBasedGame sbg) throws SlickException { ResManager.loadImages(); player = new Player(); asteroids = new Asteroids(); } @Override public void render(GameContainer gc, StateBasedGame sbg, Graphics g) throws SlickException { g.setAntiAlias(true); player.render(g); asteroids.render(g); g.drawString("Asteroids: " + Asteroids.small.size(), 10, 25); } @Override public void update(GameContainer gc, StateBasedGame sbg, int delta) throws SlickException { player.update(gc, delta); asteroids.update(delta); } } Asteroids: package me.bleedobsidian.astroidjump; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Timer; import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics; import org.newdawn.slick.Image; import org.newdawn.slick.SpriteSheet; public class Asteroids { public static ArrayList<Asteroid_Small> small = new ArrayList<Asteroid_Small>(); static SpriteSheet small_sprites = new SpriteSheet(ResManager.asteroids_small_ss, 32, 32); static Image small_1 = small_sprites.getSubImage(0, 0); static Image small_2 = small_sprites.getSubImage(1, 0); static Image small_3 = small_sprites.getSubImage(2, 0); static Image small_4 = small_sprites.getSubImage(3, 0); static boolean asteroids = true; static int diff = 0; Asteroids() { Task_Asteroids TaskA = new Task_Asteroids(); Timer timer = new Timer("Asteroids"); if(diff == 0) { timer.schedule(TaskA, 0, 4000); } else if(diff == 1) { timer.schedule(TaskA, 0, 3000); } } public static Image chooseSmallImage(int i) { if(i == 0) { return small_1; } else if(i == 1) { return small_2; } else if(i == 2) { return small_3; } else if(i == 3) { return small_4; } else { return small_1; } } public static void level_manager(float x) { if(x < 1000) { diff = 0; } else if(x < 2000) { diff = 1; } else if(x < 3000) { diff = 2; } else if(x < 5000) { diff = 3; } else if(x < 10000) { diff = 4; } else { diff = 5; } } public void update(int delta) { for(int s = 0; s < small.size(); s++) { Asteroid_Small as = small.get(s); as.update(delta); } } public void render(Graphics g) { for(int s = 0; s < small.size(); s++) { Asteroid_Small as = small.get(s); as.render(g); } } public static void setAsteroids(boolean tf) { asteroids = tf; } } Asteroid_Small: package me.bleedobsidian.astroidjump; import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics; import org.newdawn.slick.Image; public class Asteroid_Small { private static Image me; private static float x = 0; private static float y = 0; private static float speed = 0; private static float rotation = 0; private static float rotation_speed = 0; Asteroid_Small(Image i, float x, float y, float rs, float sp) { me = i; Asteroid_Small.x = x; Asteroid_Small.y = y; Asteroid_Small.rotation_speed = rs; Asteroid_Small.speed = sp; } public void update(int delta) { x -= speed * delta; rotation += rotation_speed * delta; me.setRotation(rotation); } public void render(Graphics g) { g.drawImage(me, x, y); } } Task_Asteroid: package me.bleedobsidian.astroidjump; import java.util.TimerTask; public class Task_Asteroids extends TimerTask { public void run() { if(Asteroids.diff == 0) { int randImage = (int) (Math.random() * 4); int randHeight = (int) (Math.random() * 480); Asteroids.small.add(new Asteroid_Small(Asteroids.chooseSmallImage(randImage), Player.x + 960, randHeight, 0.05f, 0.04f)); } } }

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• Typical Hadoop setup for remote job submission

  - by Artii

  So I am still a bit new to hadoop and am currently in the process of setting up a small test cluster on Amazonaws. So my question relates to some tips on the structuring of the cluster so it is possible to work submit jobs from remote machines. Currently I have 5 machines. 4 are basically the Hadoop cluster with the NameNodes, Yarn etc. One machine is used as a manager machine( Cloudera Manager). I am gonna describe my thinking process on the setup and if anyone can chime in the points I am not clear with, that would be great. I was thinking what was the best setup for a small cluster. So I decided to expose only one manager machine and probably use that to submit all the jobs through it. The other machines will see each other etc, but not be accessible from the outside world. I am have conceptual idea on how to do this,but I am not sure how to properly go about doing this though, if anyone could point me in the right direction that would great. Also another big point is, I want to be able to submit jobs to the cluster through exposed machine from a client machine (might be Windows). I am not so clear on this setup as well. Do I need to have Hadoop installed on the machine in order to use the normal hadoop commands, and to write/submit jobs say from Eclipse or something similar. So to sum it up my questions are, Is this an ok setup for a small test cluster How can I go about using one exposed machine to submit/route jobs to the cluster, without having any of the Hadoop nodes on it. How do I setup a client machine to submit jobs to a remote cluster, and an example on how to do it on Windows. Also if there are any reason not to use Windows as a client machine in this setup. Thanks I would greatly appreciate any advice or help on this.

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• Online job-searching is tedious. Help me automate it.

  - by ehsanul

  Many job sites have broken searches that don't let you narrow down jobs by experience level. Even when they do, it's usually wrong. This requires you to wade through hundreds of postings that you can't apply for before finding a relevant one, quite tedious. Since I'd rather focus on writing cover letters etc., I want to write a program to look through a large number of postings, and save the URLs of just those jobs that don't require years of experience. I don't require help writing the scraper to get the html bodies of possibly relevant job posts. The issue is accurately detecting the level of experience required for the job. This should not be too difficult as job posts are usually very explicit about this ("must have 5 years experience in..."), but there may be some issues with overly simple solutions. In my case, I'm looking for entry-level positions. Often they don't say "entry-level", but inclusion of the words probably means the job should be saved. Next, I can safely exclude a job the says it requires "5 years" of experience in whatever, so a regex like /\d\syears/ seems reasonable to exclude jobs. But then, I realized some jobs say they'll take 0-2 years of experience, matches the exclusion regex but is clearly a job I want to take a look at. Hmmm, I can handle that with another regex. But some say "less than 2 years" or "fewer than 2 years". Can handle that too, but it makes me wonder what other patterns I'm not thinking of, and possibly excluding many jobs. That's what brings me here, to find a better way to do this than regexes, if there is one. I'd like to minimize the false negative rate and save all the jobs that seem like they might not require many years of experience. Does excluding anything that matches /[3-9]\syears|1\d\syears/ seem reasonable? Or is there a better way? Training a bayesian filter maybe?

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• Job queueing and execute Mechanism

  - by Calm Storm

  In my webservice all method calls submits jobs to a queue. Basically these operations take long time to execute, so all these operations submit a Job to a queue and return a status saying "Submitted". Then the client keeps polling using another service method to check for the status of the job. Presently, what I do is create my own Queue, Job classes that are Serializable and persist these jobs (i.e, their serialized byte stream format) into the database. So an UpdateLogistics operation just queues up a "UpdateLogisticsJob" to the queue and returns. I have written my own JobExecutor which wakes up every N seconds, scans the database table for any existing jobs, and executes them. Note the jobs have to persisted because these jobs have to survive app-server crashes. This was done a long time ago, and I used bespoke classes for my Queues, Jobs, Executors etc. But now, I would like to know has someone done something similar before? In particular, Are there frameworks available for this ? Something in Spring/Apache etc Any framework that is easy to adapt/debug and plays well along with libraries like Spring will be great.

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• Algorithm to retrieve every possible combination of sublists of a two lists

  - by sgmoore

  Suppose I have two lists, how do I iterate through every possible combination of every sublist, such that each item appears once and only once. I guess an example could be if you have employees and jobs and you want split them into teams, where each employee can only be in one team and each job can only be in one team. Eg List<string> employees = new List<string>() { "Adam", "Bob"} ; List<string> jobs = new List<string>() { "1", "2", "3"}; I want Adam : 1 Bob : 2 , 3 Adam : 1 , 2 Bob : 3 Adam : 1 , 3 Bob : 2 Adam : 2 Bob : 1 , 3 Adam : 2 , 3 Bob : 1 Adam : 3 Bob : 1 , 2 Adam, Bob : 1, 2, 3 I tried using the answer to this stackoverflow question to generate a list of every possible combination of employees and every possible combination of jobs and then select one item from each from each list, but that's about as far as I got. I don't know the maximum size of the lists, but it would be certainly be less than 100 and there may be other limiting factors (such as each team can have no more than 5 employees) Update Not sure whether this can be tidied up more and/or simplified, but this is what I have ended up with so far. It uses the Group algorithm supplied by Yorye (see his answer below), but I removed the orderby which I don't need and caused problems if the keys are not comparable. var employees = new List<string>() { "Adam", "Bob" } ; var jobs = new List<string>() { "1", "2", "3" }; int c= 0; foreach (int noOfTeams in Enumerable.Range(1, employees.Count)) { var hs = new HashSet<string>(); foreach( var grouping in Group(Enumerable.Range(1, noOfTeams).ToList(), employees)) { // Generate a unique key for each group to detect duplicates. var key = string.Join(":" , grouping.Select(sub => string.Join(",", sub))); if (!hs.Add(key)) continue; List<List<string>> teams = (from r in grouping select r.ToList()).ToList(); foreach (var group in Group(teams, jobs)) { foreach (var sub in group) { Console.WriteLine(String.Join(", " , sub.Key ) + " : " + string.Join(", ", sub)); } Console.WriteLine(); c++; } } } Console.WriteLine(String.Format("{0:n0} combinations for {1} employees and {2} jobs" , c , employees.Count, jobs.Count)); Since I'm not worried about the order of the results, this seems to give me what I need.

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• The Art of Productivity

  - by dwahlin

  Getting things done has always been a challenge regardless of gender, age, race, skill, or job position. No matter how hard some people try, they end up procrastinating tasks until the last minute. Some people simply focus better when they know they’re out of time and can’t procrastinate any longer. How many times have you put off working on a term paper in school until the very last minute? With only a few hours left your mental energy and focus seem to kick in to high gear especially as you realize that you either get the paper done now or risk failing. It’s amazing how a little pressure can turn into a motivator and allow our minds to focus on a given task. Some people seem to specialize in procrastinating just about everything they do while others tend to be the “doers” who get a lot done and ultimately rise up the ladder at work. What’s the difference between these types of people? Is it pure laziness or are other factors at play? I think that some people are certainly more motivated than others, but I also think a lot of it is based on the process that “doers” tend to follow - whether knowingly or unknowingly. While I’ve certainly fought battles with procrastination, I’ve always had a knack for being able to get a lot done in a relatively short amount of time. I think a lot of my “get it done” attitude goes back to the the strong work ethic my parents instilled in me at a young age. I remember my dad saying, “You need to learn to work hard!” when I was around 5 years old. I remember that moment specifically because I was on a tractor with him the first time I heard it while he was trying to move some large rocks into a pile. The tractor was big but so were the rocks and my dad had to balance the tractor perfectly so that it didn’t tip forward too far. It was challenging work and somewhat tedious but my dad finished the task and taught me a few important lessons along the way including persistence, the importance of having a skill, and getting the job done right without skimping along the way. In this post I’m going to list a few of the techniques and processes I follow that I hope may be beneficial to others. I blogged about the general concept back in 2009 but thought I’d share some updated information and lessons learned since then. Most of the ideas that follow came from learning and refining my daily work process over the years. However, since most of the ideas are common sense (at least in my opinion), I suspect they can be found in other productivity processes that are out there. Let’s start off with one of the most important yet simple tips: Start Each Day with a List. Start Each Day with a List What are you planning to get done today? Do you keep track of everything in your head or rely on your calendar? While most of us think that we’re pretty good at managing “to do” lists strictly in our head you might be surprised at how affective writing out lists can be. By writing out tasks you’re forced to focus on the most important tasks to accomplish that day, commit yourself to those tasks, and have an easy way to track what was supposed to get done and what actually got done. Start every morning by making a list of specific tasks that you want to accomplish throughout the day. I’ll even go so far as to fill in times when I’d like to work on tasks if I have a lot of meetings or other events tying up my calendar on a given day. I’m not a big fan of using paper since I type a lot faster than I write (plus I write like a 3rd grader according to my wife), so I use the Sticky Notes feature available in Windows. Here’s an example of yesterday’s sticky note: What do you add to your list? That’s the subject of the next tip. Focus on Small Tasks It’s no secret that focusing on small, manageable tasks is more effective than trying to focus on large and more vague tasks. When you make your list each morning only add tasks that you can accomplish within a given time period. For example, if I only have 30 minutes blocked out to work on an article I don’t list “Write Article”. If I do that I’ll end up wasting 30 minutes stressing about how I’m going to get the article done in 30 minutes and ultimately get nothing done. Instead, I’ll list something like “Write Introductory Paragraphs for Article”. The next day I may add, “Write first section of article” or something that’s small and manageable – something I’m confident that I can get done. You’ll find that once you’ve knocked out several smaller tasks it’s easy to continue completing others since you want to keep the momentum going. In addition to keeping my tasks focused and small, I also make a conscious effort to limit my list to 4 or 5 tasks initially. I’ve found that if I list more than 5 tasks I feel a bit overwhelmed which hurts my productivity. It’s easy to add additional tasks as you complete others and you get the added benefit of that confidence boost of knowing that you’re being productive and getting things done as you remove tasks and add others. Getting Started is the Hardest (Yet Easiest) Part I’ve always found that getting started is the hardest part and one of the biggest contributors to procrastination. Getting started working on tasks is a lot like getting a large rock pushed to the bottom of a hill. It’s difficult to get the rock rolling at first, but once you manage to get it rocking some it’s really easy to get it rolling on its way to the bottom. As an example, I’ve written 100s of articles for technical magazines over the years and have really struggled with the initial introductory paragraphs. Keep in mind that these are the paragraphs that don’t really add that much value (in my opinion anyway). They introduce the reader to the subject matter and nothing more. What a waste of time for me to sit there stressing about how to start the article. On more than one occasion I’ve spent more than an hour trying to come up with 2-3 paragraphs of text.  Talk about a productivity killer! Whether you’re struggling with a writing task, some code for a project, an email, or other tasks, jumping in without thinking too much is the best way to get started I’ve found. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have an overall plan when jumping into a task, but on some occasions you’ll find that if you simply jump into the task and stop worrying about doing everything perfectly that things will flow more smoothly. For my introductory paragraph problem I give myself 5 minutes to write out some general concepts about what I know the article will cover and then spend another 10-15 minutes going back and refining that information. That way I actually have some ideas to work with rather than a blank sheet of paper. If I still find myself struggling I’ll write the rest of the article first and then circle back to the introductory paragraphs once I’m done. To sum this tip up: Jump into a task without thinking too hard about it. It’s better to to get the rock at the top of the hill rocking some than doing nothing at all. You can always go back and refine your work.   Learn a Productivity Technique and Stick to It There are a lot of different productivity programs and seminars out there being sold by companies. I’ve always laughed at how much money people spend on some of these motivational programs/seminars because I think that being productive isn’t that hard if you create a re-useable set of steps and processes to follow. That’s not to say that some of these programs/seminars aren’t worth the money of course because I know they’ve definitely benefited some people that have a hard time getting things done and staying focused. One of the best productivity techniques I’ve ever learned is called the “Pomodoro Technique” and it’s completely free. This technique is an extremely simple way to manage your time without having to remember a bunch of steps, color coding mechanisms, or other processes. The technique was originally developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 80s and can be implemented with a simple timer. In a nutshell here’s how the technique works: Pick a task to work on Set the timer to 25 minutes and work on the task Once the timer rings record your time Take a 5 minute break Repeat the process Here’s why the technique works well for me: It forces me to focus on a single task for 25 minutes. In the past I had no time goal in mind and just worked aimlessly on a task until I got interrupted or bored. 25 minutes is a small enough chunk of time for me to stay focused. Any distractions that may come up have to wait until after the timer goes off. If the distraction is really important then I stop the timer and record my time up to that point. When the timer is running I act as if I only have 25 minutes total for the task (like you’re down to the last 25 minutes before turning in your term paper….frantically working to get it done) which helps me stay focused and turns into a “beat the clock” type of game. It’s actually kind of fun if you treat it that way and really helps me focus on a the task at hand. I automatically know how much time I’m spending on a given task (more on this later) by using this technique. I know that I have 5 minutes after each pomodoro (the 25 minute sprint) to waste on anything I’d like including visiting a website, stepping away from the computer, etc. which also helps me stay focused when the 25 minute timer is counting down. I use this technique so much that I decided to build a program for Windows 8 called Pomodoro Focus (I plan to blog about how it was built in a later post). It’s a Windows Store application that allows people to track tasks, productive time spent on tasks, interruption time experienced while working on a given task, and the number of pomodoros completed. If a time estimate is given when the task is initially created, Pomodoro Focus will also show the task completion percentage. I like it because it allows me to track my tasks, time spent on tasks (very useful in the consulting world), and even how much time I wasted on tasks (pressing the pause button while working on a task starts the interruption timer). I recently added a new feature that charts productive and interruption time for tasks since I wanted to see how productive I was from week to week and month to month. A few screenshots from the Pomodoro Focus app are shown next, I had a lot of fun building it and use it myself to as I work on tasks.   There are certainly many other productivity techniques and processes out there (and a slew of books describing them), but the Pomodoro Technique has been the simplest and most effective technique I’ve ever come across for staying focused and getting things done.   Persistence is Key Getting things done is great but one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is that persistence is key especially when you’re trying to get something done that at times seems insurmountable. Small tasks ultimately lead to larger tasks getting accomplished, however, it’s not all roses along the way as some of the smaller tasks may come with their own share of bumps and bruises that lead to discouragement about the end goal and whether or not it is worth achieving at all. I’ve been on several long-term projects over my career as a software developer (I have one personal project going right now that fits well here) and found that repeating, “Persistence is the key!” over and over to myself really helps. Not every project turns out to be successful, but if you don’t show persistence through the hard times you’ll never know if you succeeded or not. Likewise, if you don’t persistently stick to the process of creating a daily list, follow a productivity process, etc. then the odds of consistently staying productive aren’t good.   Track Your Time How much time do you actually spend working on various tasks? If you don’t currently track time spent answering emails, on phone calls, and working on various tasks then you might be surprised to find out that a task that you thought was going to take you 30 minutes ultimately ended up taking 2 hours. If you don’t track the time you spend working on tasks how can you expect to learn from your mistakes, optimize your time better, and become more productive? That’s another reason why I like the Pomodoro Technique – it makes it easy to stay focused on tasks while also tracking how much time I’m working on a given task.   Eliminate Distractions I blogged about this final tip several years ago but wanted to bring it up again. If you want to be productive (and ultimately successful at whatever you’re doing) then you can’t waste a lot of time playing games or on Twitter, Facebook, or other time sucking websites. If you see an article you’re interested in that has no relation at all to the tasks you’re trying to accomplish then bookmark it and read it when you have some spare time (such as during a pomodoro break). Fighting the temptation to check your friends’ status updates on Facebook? Resist the urge and realize how much those types of activities are hurting your productivity and taking away from your focus. I’ll admit that eliminating distractions is still tough for me personally and something I have to constantly battle. But, I’ve made a conscious decision to cut back on my visits and updates to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sites. Sure, my Klout score has suffered as a result lately, but does anyone actually care about those types of scores aside from your online “friends” (few of whom you’ve actually met in person)? :-) Ultimately it comes down to self-discipline and how badly you want to be productive and successful in your career, life goals, hobbies, or whatever you’re working on. Rather than having your homepage take you to a time wasting news site, game site, social site, picture site, or others, how about adding something like the following as your homepage? Every time your browser opens you’ll see a personal message which helps keep you on the right track. You can download my ubber-sophisticated homepage here if interested. Summary Is there a single set of steps that if followed can ultimately lead to productivity? I don’t think so since one size has never fit all. Every person is different, works in their own unique way, and has their own set of motivators, distractions, and more. While I certainly don’t consider myself to be an expert on the subject of productivity, I do think that if you learn what steps work best for you and gradually refine them over time that you can come up with a personal productivity process that can serve you well. Productivity is definitely an “art” that anyone can learn with a little practice and persistence. You’ve seen some of the steps that I personally like to follow and I hope you find some of them useful in boosting your productivity. If you have others you use please leave a comment. I’m always looking for ways to improve.

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• SQL Server 2008 Recovery Mode reverts from FULL to SIMPLE

  - by Eric Hazen

  Three of our SQL databases have their recovery model change every night from FULL to SIMPLE. The only jobs that I'm aware of are two BackupExec jobs that run nightly. Why would the recovery model change? Backup Jobs: SQL FULL BACKUP, SQL LOG BACKUP Event Manager: Event 5084: Setting Database option RECOVERY to SIMPLE for database databaseName

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• How do I configure the number of worker threads used by SqlServer 2005 Agent

  - by Decker

  How can I increase the limit of worker threads from the default 10 for SQL Server 2005 SqlAgent? I have 9 jobs that run almost continuously and that leaves only one available thread for the rest of the scheduled jobs. Oftentimes, when no thread is available, I will see the jobs in "Waiting for worker thread" state. I'd like to increase the number to about 12 (which should do the trick for me). Any idea where this is set?

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• Linux buffer cache effect on IO writes?

  - by Patrick LeBoutillier

  I'm copying large files (3 x 30G) between 2 filesystems on a Linux server (kernel 2.6.37, 16 cores, 32G RAM) and I'm getting poor performance. I suspect that the usage of the buffer cache is killing the I/O performance. To try and narrow down the problem I used fio directly on the SAS disk to monitor the performance. Here is the output of 2 fio runs (the first with direct=1, the second one direct=0): Config: [test] rw=write blocksize=32k size=20G filename=/dev/sda # direct=1 Run 1: test: (g=0): rw=write, bs=32K-32K/32K-32K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1 Starting 1 process Jobs: 1 (f=1): [W] [100.0% done] [0K/205M /s] [0/6K iops] [eta 00m:00s] test: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=4667 write: io=20,480MB, bw=199MB/s, iops=6,381, runt=102698msec clat (usec): min=104, max=13,388, avg=152.06, stdev=72.43 bw (KB/s) : min=192448, max=213824, per=100.01%, avg=204232.82, stdev=4084.67 cpu : usr=3.37%, sys=16.55%, ctx=655410, majf=0, minf=29 IO depths : 1=100.0%, 2=0.0%, 4=0.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, >=64=0.0% submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0% complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0% issued r/w: total=0/655360, short=0/0 lat (usec): 250=99.50%, 500=0.45%, 750=0.01%, 1000=0.01% lat (msec): 2=0.01%, 4=0.02%, 10=0.01%, 20=0.01% Run status group 0 (all jobs): WRITE: io=20,480MB, aggrb=199MB/s, minb=204MB/s, maxb=204MB/s, mint=102698msec, maxt=102698msec Disk stats (read/write): sda: ios=0/655238, merge=0/0, ticks=0/79552, in_queue=78640, util=76.55% Run 2: test: (g=0): rw=write, bs=32K-32K/32K-32K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1 Starting 1 process Jobs: 1 (f=1): [W] [100.0% done] [0K/0K /s] [0/0 iops] [eta 00m:00s] test: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=4733 write: io=20,480MB, bw=91,265KB/s, iops=2,852, runt=229786msec clat (usec): min=16, max=127K, avg=349.53, stdev=4694.98 bw (KB/s) : min=56013, max=1390016, per=101.47%, avg=92607.31, stdev=167453.17 cpu : usr=0.41%, sys=6.93%, ctx=21128, majf=0, minf=33 IO depths : 1=100.0%, 2=0.0%, 4=0.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, >=64=0.0% submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0% complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0% issued r/w: total=0/655360, short=0/0 lat (usec): 20=5.53%, 50=93.89%, 100=0.02%, 250=0.01%, 500=0.01% lat (msec): 2=0.01%, 4=0.01%, 10=0.01%, 20=0.01%, 50=0.12% lat (msec): 100=0.38%, 250=0.04% Run status group 0 (all jobs): WRITE: io=20,480MB, aggrb=91,265KB/s, minb=93,455KB/s, maxb=93,455KB/s, mint=229786msec, maxt=229786msec Disk stats (read/write): sda: ios=8/79811, merge=7/7721388, ticks=9/32418456, in_queue=32471983, util=98.98% I'm not knowledgeable enough with fio to interpret the results, but I don't expect the overall performance using the buffer cache to be 50% less than with O_DIRECT. Can someone help me interpret the fio output? Are there any kernel tunings that could fix/minimize the problem? Thanks a lot,

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• Manually start scheduled launchd job

  - by Pascal

  On our Mac OS X (10.6) Server we have setup several backup scripts that are controlled by launchd and launched at specific times. For this we have defined StartCalendarInterval and this all works very well. Now it happens that I would like to start one of these jobs out of schedule, but this does not start the job (but also does not give an error/warning): sudo launchctl start org.job-label The manpage of launchtl states that start is intended to test on-demand jobs, no word of scheduled jobs. Is there a way to kickstart scheduled jobs?

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